Pushing on our second sprint, we’ve started building and shipping! The first iteration is a variant of an old project of ours: Anekdote. Well, we have revived the site, it’s back on anekdote.co.The spirit is fantastic and has Vincent‘s energy and interest in minimalism. We’re happy with the current result.

Starting side hustles has been a dream of ours for years. We tried multiple times but have been successful. Vincent and I are giving it another shot. 2020 big project, here we come!

We’ve always had an itch for creating side projects. A few years ago, and from Hong Kong, we worked on Anekdote. Anekdote was a platform to help our community find products that were beautifully conceived and crafted. We got a small crowd of followers and appreciated the design edge of our site. But it never took off.

With the birth of our first baby, we hired a yuesao for 40 days. A yuesao is somebody staying at home and helping parents with an infant. Our experience didn’t go well – but that taught me a life lesson: the difference between “Learning From” VS “Delegating to.”

Vincent and I started carnet.cc a little over a year ago. The ride is fun and challenging. Fun because we learn as much from the process of writing than the writing we create. And challenging, because we both are not great writers. It takes a lot of energy to get something out of our brain.

November this year, my wife delivered our baby daughter. It is the most exciting event that we have experienced. Every single day, we are grateful for the chance to be parents. We aren’t experts, but we do our best to help her grow healthily.

My partner’s day to day has been most impacted. She needs to feed the baby and rest on a 24/7 basis, on short ~2-3 hours cycles. Intense.

Having a baby and trying to maintain a blog is a challenge. The lack of sleep, irregular but frequent interruptions, and holding a moving mini-cute-monster, are making the act of writing all the more complex.

Traditionally, I have optimized my process of writing: I think of blog post ideas on the metro ride back home. I start an Evernote post (but switching to paperus.co from my good friend Jeriel) and jot down some initial thoughts. Back home, I take a deep breath and focus for 30 to 60 minutes to write the first draft. A couple of days later, I review the post and correct it with Hemingway and Grammarly (but soon, all that process will be done on paperus.co). The final step is straightforward but time-consuming: I format the post nicely and publish it on our WordPress site, right here.

Writing with a baby, I don’t get 30 to 60 minutes of focus. And I can’t find the time to format the blog post.

There aren’t many solutions that I can think of at this stage. But I will ask fellow bloggers and find my ways. In the meantime, I expect shorter blog posts. Ideally, I would post them more frequently. And probably more podcasts and interviews – but without the transcription (that I always correct manually).

Fatherhood is a wonderful gift. But writing with a baby is a challenge. I am still experimenting to find the flow and the routine. That’s what I need to deliver blog posts on a more regular basis.

This post is part of a larger interest, called self-structure, where I look into ways to support personal growth by organizing how I live. While I stay away from going to extremes, it has always been important for me to explore how I can improve, scale my impact, and structure my days. In this post, we look at setting up the evening routine.

Your morning routine starts with the way you sleep. Waking up in a consistent manner won’t happen unless you structure your nights. There is no way we can function on a daily basis, in a hyper-performance environment, without taking care of our sleep. I wanted to believe otherwise — but nop, it is impossible. Some people promise the wonders of 4 hours a night. I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt and find a few months later that it was their worst experience ever. I need a complete 8 hours night of sleep to make sure that I keep my energy high, be a nice person, and make sane decisions.

In this podcast with Linka Lin, who works for the United Nations Development Programme in Bangkok, we discuss making life-changing decisions, keeping one’s energy high, and supporting the next generation of innovators.

Slush Shanghai 2019 was a grand celebration of global tech and startups. It got me thinking about standing out as a tech conference.

I have a conflicting opinion of such events. They allow thousands of people to hear cool topics directly from thought leaders. And at the same time, they create the hope for dozens of startups that they’ll get noticed by media and investors. As a community builder and somebody generally in touch with the latest ideas and robust network, tech conferences don’t create something unique.

The Chinese’s innovation landscape is a complex adaptive system, moving at full speed. This idea doesn’t please delegations that visit us from around the world. They come to Shanghai, hoping to form an opinion on the growing presence of Chinese startup news in their media. While we wish we had a clear and marketable story to share, this is the closest thing I found.

Last week at XNode, Kevin and I brainstormed on how to build a stronger profile as public speakers. For work and fun, we need to get in front of people and share ideas. We often end up hosting two to three workshops a week with different groups or delegations. That gives us a regular practice and an excellent opportunity to build a community.